


When the Sun Went Out, We Stole the Godly Torch

by et2brute



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Be with me, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Ghosts, Porn with Feelings, Sad with a Happy Ending, True Love, Weird Plot Shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:35:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23770930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/et2brute/pseuds/et2brute
Summary: Ben tries.  He reaches for the Force, always ready just beneath his fingertips, a second skin on the underside of his chest.  He reaches for it, but nothing is where it used to be.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 12
Kudos: 36





	When the Sun Went Out, We Stole the Godly Torch

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting on my g-drive for months. I really hated the butchered-as-fuck ending of Rise of Skywalker, and this was the best way I could write fix-it without it straight-up devolving into an AU rewrite. A lot of this is just Ben!introspection and sadness, with a little bit of tough-guy!Rey and a light side of porn, but I hope you find it enjoyable anyway.

Ben Solo opens his eyes to darkness and disorientation, blinking away the wetness gathered there. He was dreaming.

He sits up, bulky and too-long for his bed, before realizing he isn’t in his bed at all. He isn’t in his chambers aboard his Star Destroyer, hovering beside a broken black pedestal that Rey had cut down with wild abandon, aiming for his head, but not. Not really.

This is because, for the first time in years, he no longer feels like Kylo Ren. That part of him died, and that man is gone, and all that is left is Ben Solo, holding his face in his hands and remembering the girl who kissed him, who he had brought back to life out of whole cloth, and who had vanished like smoke from between his hands.

*

Ben is on Tatooine, wading through memories that are not his own, a giant stretched like sunset-shadows over the dunes. The ghosts don’t come to him, and he doesn’t hear his father’s voice. Not for the first time, he wonders if perhaps they are with Rey, wherever she is.

The anger he used to carry—always and heavy, burning up within him, scorching chest and throat and tongue until he could not bear it, until he burst—he holds it like an afterthought, now. A dead star. Something almost weightless compared to the sinking puncture of reality it had once been. A holy book, a codex of rage, the text forever inscribed on the insides of his eyelids, but the faith that had manifested them into prayer has long since guttered out.

He walks where his uncle walked, and where his grandfather walked. He tries to follow the fate of the star-bright child who was swallowed by darkness, and who became its master. He stands near the spaceport at Mos Espa, alone and unilaterally avoided by the native crush of city-dwellers, and wonders if Anakin had ever hesitated. If he had been wracked with uncertainty and guilt, stood breathless with loss and despair.

Ben drifts through the slums and wonders if Darth Vader’s body, at his end, had evaporated into light in the way of the Jedi; a spirit too pure for the body to rot. Luke had never said one way or the other. Ben’s chest aches. He’d spoken to Anakin so often over the years, and Anakin had given him nothing but silence. Not when he needed the voice of someone who knew him, who knew his path; never when his solitude had all but buried him. Ben had never learned how to be alone. He hadn’t started that way.

He thinks Anakin must have. He knows Rey did.

Ben swallows around the dry click in his throat, and thinks about getting the old moisture farm running again. Opens his mouth to ask the opinion of the dry, empty air, but his voice seems to have lost its heart also.

Does it ever rain on this planet? Once upon a time, another man in another life had opened his eyes to the rain on his face, a galaxy away from the girl who had been standing in it.

He can’t breathe for how badly he misses that.

*

The Force has hollowed him out. Kylo Ren had spent weeks on desert planets, sucking up heat from vicinate suns in his black cloak and armor, a wraith from another world unaffected by the discomforts of this one.

But Ben, somehow, is real to it—stifled, trapped, skin too-tight, his precious sweat stolen away droplet by droplet. He trades for lighter clothes, raw fabrics undyed in every color of bone, and tries not to think of the bodies the Jawas pulled them off of. They drape awkwardly over his chest, oversized but not quite long enough to to suit his torso or his legs. But they take some of the weight off him, and when he wraps his head, they shield his dark hair, reflect the molten heat away.

For the next week, he hardly feels any heaviness at all. And he realizes the pale fabric reminds him of Rey.

*

He bundles the tunics and trousers, the long cloak, the gloves and the boots—the last of Kylo Ren’s raiment—into a tidy package, tucked and knotted together. Just outside the Lars Homestead, he buries them by hand like a corpse. His compact starcruiser is nearby, with his bed and his enviro controls and his security protocols, but he sleeps outside, in the shell of a half-collapsed dome.

In the morning, the grave is invisible beneath shifted sands, all signs of it swept away in the night wind like his own lost footprints.

But he squints in the dawn light with mounting disbelief.

Looping around the place where the hole had been, where he had knelt in silent farewell to the man who had consumed Ben Solo—much smaller and closer together than his own, steady at first, then frantic—are a second set of tracks.

*

Ben searches for days. He chokes down the warm water from his filtration unit and bellows her name. It comes out rough, and split, and completely the wrong shape. It comes out, “Please!”

He doesn’t see the tracks after the first day. They come from nowhere. They lead nowhere.

It’s possible he was simply dehydrated. He hasn’t been drinking enough water. He hasn’t been eating more than the occasional ration, when it comes to mind, and the rations seem to be lasting much longer than they should.

He spends too much time near the place where he buried his old clothes, baking under the midday sky. He can’t quite bring himself to sleep there at night, exposed outside the ruins of the homestead, but he still avoids sleeping on his ship.

For as long as he can, he doesn’t sleep at all.

On the fourth morning, he hears, “I’m not alone,” and opens his eyes to no one.

He shuts them again, and remembers the curve of Rey’s face under his hand, as though they were still sharing a dream.

“You’re not alone,” he echoes, his throat aching with the effort.

The wind shifts. He thinks he can smell her. But there’s no one around for miles.

He realizes he has a fever when stiff knuckles graze his forehead, the sensation of warmth and worry, the light scrape of his mother’s ring.

“There’s a medpack on the ship,” someone says. His own ghost, perhaps, voice distorted and strange.

“You need water.”

“You need to eat.”

“You need to sleep.”

“You need—”

The sun sinks below the horizon as the voices chase each other around his headache. He drinks sloppily from the filtrator. He starts to feel cool, then cold, and then he starts to shake.

“Luke?” He asks thickly, confused at the way his hands claw into the cooling sand.

“I’m so sorry, Ben,” Luke’s ghost whispers against the top of his head. Ben feels like a child. “I’m so sorry. I never said.”

“Are you,” Ben manages, breath coming fast and short, “are you all waiting for me? Are you—are my, is Dad—”

The wind picks up, wicking away Ben’s fever-sweat. It makes a sound like a distant scream, and Ben’s head falls against the cool metal of his ship’s landing gear. He doesn’t remember crawling here. He sleeps.

*

He wakes up on the ship, in his bed, stripped to the waist. His clothes are slick with sweat. He tries to remember when he did it, or when he stuck himself with the medpack. He may have used the Force, to haul his body through the door, to inject the Bacta serum into his blood.

But then he remembers that he can’t.

He hasn’t been able to use the Force since pouring everything he had of it into Rey.

In the refresher, Ben stares at the mirror and tries to recognize the eyes that stare back. He washes a body that feels foreign to him. He combs his fingers through his tangled hair and breathes heavily on the glass.

He writes in the condensation, B.

B E

B E W I T H

When he pauses, the image fades as though it were never there.

*

He trades with the Jawas for spare parts. He cannibalizes his cruiser for anything they don’t have, and he repairs the moisture farm to a minimum of functionality. He starts to rebuild some of the structures.

He buries himself in this for a week, two weeks. A month.

In the evening, he sees a black tunic strewn over the sand, the frayed mouth of a small hole trailing threads in the wind.

He smooths his thumb over the fabric. The hole is a perfect circle, scorched evenly all around.

When Ben scoops the sand free, seeking to replace the errant garment to its final resting place, his fingertips brush cool metal.

“I didn’t bury either of you,” he accuses, but the words come out like a sob.

“You’re still alive,” a voice says. His mother’s voice.

“I can’t see you,” he weeps, tucked in at his belly, his voice muffled by his hands. “I never got to see you again.”

“I’m with you,” she insists. “My son.”

“Be with us,” another voice says.

Ben tries. He reaches for the Force, always ready just beneath his fingertips, a second skin on the underside of his chest. He reaches for it, but nothing is where it used to be.

*

He dreams of her. Of Rey.

“I’m close,” she says, her spine long against his belly. She’s so small, so completely enshrouded by the mantle of his arms, that he fears she might absorb into his chest completely; that she might truly become a part of him and disappear. Freckles shine on her bare shoulders like inverted stars, like a galaxy pulled outside of itself. This feeling—this closeness, being inside of her, feeling the sand slipping between her fingers like he once felt the pull of a stolen necklace as though it had been torn from his own neck—it will kill him, he will die with how much he can’t keep of it.

He presses his mouth against the top of her spine, drags it up through sticky hair to the crown of her head. “I don’t know how to exist without you.”

“Don’t stop,” she pleads, her arms weak with the effort of pushing her body back against the jerk of his hips. “If you stop, I can’t—”

He tips his head down, presses his face between her shoulder blades. Breathes her in. Hooks his forearm more firmly across her waist, and slides his cheek through moisture and salt.

This is it. This is all there is, he realizes desperately. He reaches for the rest—the sensation of her voice in his private chambers, the sweep of lush grass sewn suddenly into his polished metal floor. His dark bed softly illuminated by the same sunlight sketching golden halos from her hair.

He gasps, gritting his teeth around the shared air of a split atom. Feels her body bear down around him, even as he seeks the starlight path, the shadowy byways that bore them _through_ each other, to _reach_ each other—

“Almost,” Rey sobs. “Just—just a little more— _please_ —”

“I can’t even _pretend_ ,” he growls bitterly, choking on every syllable. 

Ben wakes up with ejaculate rapidly cooling on his belly. The bond is gone. Even in his dreams, he can only get as close to Rey as fucking her.

*

He showers. He cleans his teeth. He doesn’t blow on the refresher mirror, but the steam fogs it up around the letters he traced out days ago. And the rest of them, somehow more recent: M E.

He sweeps the edge of his palm over the glass.

*

The construction project drags on. What would take hours with the Force takes weeks without it, slow and tedious, repetitive down to the fresh calluses on his hands and the dull ache in his back. He starts to trade water, now that the moisture farm is producing. He never considers what might happen if he were attacked. If he could hold his own without his former peerless might, if he could even swing a lightsaber on solely the strength of his arm.

He visits the small grave, the quietly-expanding mausoleum of dead things whose rest he continues to disturb.

Sand sticky on his palms and crushed up beneath his nails, he touches the twin hilts wrapped in the tunic of his resurrection and thinks about shared blood. About Luke, down to breath and the marrow, as much Ben’s parent as Leia was. Maybe it was so hard for his father because Han wasn’t like Luke or Leia, and perhaps Ben was like both of them. Or—

No. That’s wrong.

His uncle and his mother, together, were a true refraction of Anakin’s powerful spirit. There was enough light congealed between them to keep the shadows at bay. They divided the weight of his power, and neither broke beneath it. But Ben was the final star in the Skywalker constellation; all of that oily darkness had distilled inside of him, a solitary vessel unfit to contain it. Inevitably, it had overflowed; inevitably, he had drowned.

Ben fingers the scorched hole in the fabric, touches the places where Rey had touched, remembers the feeling of being knit back together from the inside. Wonders who he might be like now, when there's no one left.

“ _B_ _en_.”

Rey’s voice. But her ghost is nowhere to be seen.

Ben wonders how long it will take before he loses his mind completely. If maybe that’s the only way he’ll see them again.

He chews on a ration bar that has started to go off. He drinks a bit of sour water. He doesn’t carry the lightsabers of Anakin's children with him, because maybe it’s time for some things to stay buried.

When he turns around, there are big, angry letters picked out in the sand, already losing definition to the wind:

B E W I T H M E.

The inside of Ben's mouth feels tight. The letters stare at him, and he doesn't have the courage to stare back. Eventually they disappear.

Sometimes, after the sun sets, Ben builds a fire and watches the boundary between sight and blindness. Sometimes he sits up in his small room on the cruiser and scans for incoming data packets. He hasn't slept inside the Homestead yet, even though the restorations have progressed enough to provide a serviceable shelter.

Days pass. Another week. Another month.

Most of the parts he pulled off his ship have been replaced. He’s played with the idea of getting some Droid or another to run the farm after he leaves; he’s played with the idea of leaving. He has nowhere to go, but that only means that he could go anywhere.

That’s what Han had done. Ben dissembles and cleans and rebuilds an old blaster in a clumsy, new way, as though using someone else’s fingers. He builds a few targets from scrap. He gives it a shot.

Padawan.

He pulls the trigger.

Jedi Knight.

Aims higher.

First Order Commander.

Relaxes his wrist against the kick.

Master of the Knights of Ren.

Bends his elbow.

Supreme Leader.

His hand spasms, and the blaster falls soundlessly onto the sand. He swallows around his tongue, squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them, a strip of pale fabric dances larghetto in the wind, as though underwater.

He’s on his knees, staring at bare ankles. He raises his eyes, shin to thigh to hip, tucked vest, loose layered linen. A smooth throat, the curve of a jaw, the thin press of a worried mouth.

Please, he begs, but the word doesn’t form.

Small fingers touch his face, but when he looks up, there’s nothing and no one in front of him but sunlight.

*

“Didn’t I teach you how to swap out parts,” his father chastises. Another memory.

“I don’t need the short-range fuel cell,” Ben argues, even though he knows it’s useless. “The wrong blaster is just as useless as no blaster.”

“Kid, that’s soldier talk. A smuggler makes do.”

Ben shakes his head. “The plasma dissipates before—”

“So get closer.”

Ben stares sightlessly at the place where his father isn’t. He’s alone on the ship, restocked, recharged. Waiting.

He’s stopped sleeping outside. He could leave Tatooine at any time.

“What,” he whispers.

“Closer,” Han’s voice starts, but it’s Rey’s voice who finishes on the final syllable.

*

In the middle of the night, he feels her warmth pressed against his body.

Moonlight filters in through the window and floods his bed, carves her shoulder out of glowing gossamer, traces the dip of her waist and the swell of her hip. Casts her hair, undone and all around him, in molten silver silk.

“Why did you disappear,” he half-whispers, half-sobs.

“ _Be with me,_ ” Rey begs.

*

He leaves Lars Homestead in the morning. Tatooine fades out behind him, a chipped red circle dissolving into endless white.

The Graveyard isn't something he consciously thought about before sliding out of hyperspace into the sharp darkness between asteroids. The field spreads out before him, irregular shapes painted half white and half black in their silent orbit around a solitary star. He keeps opposite the space station, shielded from radar by the sun itself; he’s sure his mother still has friends there, those who haven’t yet moved on to New Alderaan, but he has no desire to speak to anyone, to explain himself, to share his grief or his loss.

He stares out at rubble, at wreckage from a previous lifetime. His mother brought him here only once, as a very small child, too young to understand how a massive cluster of scattered stone had ever been her home. They had landed on the flotilla, and people he had never met had embraced him, had called him, “Little prince.”

They’d told him stories about his parents, revolutionaries and war heroes both. Leia’s _Mirrorbright_. The cleverly hidden weapons Han had installed.

His parents had sung him the lullaby together.

Ben pushes his hand against his mouth, the asteroid field burned against the insides of his eyelids.

Mirror-bright shines the moon, his memory plays, unbidden. A glow as soft as an ember…

“When the moon is mirror-bright,” his mother’s warm, strong voice rises like a summer wind.

“Take this time to remember,” Ben whisper-sings. His voice breaks over it, and he turns his head and looks into his mother’s eyes.

“I can see you,” he says, wretched.

“You didn’t have to come all the way to the Alderaan Asteroid Belt to do it,” she exhales through her nose, smiling up at him. “You’re just like your father. You can’t do something straight. You have to take the long way around, even when you want to be caught.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“You’re still alive,” she repeats. “You need to come back.”

To Tatooine? His brows knit together. The closest thing he has to a home is his little starcruiser. “I don’t understand, I—”

She squeezes his hand, suddenly, real and strong. “You’re so close, Ben. You have everything you need.”

I have nothing, he rages bitterly, the thought like a knife of heat in his belly, searing at the back of his throat. I’m _alone_.

“You’re not alone,” Rey says from somewhere behind him. But when Ben looks for her, she isn’t there.

And when he turns back to his mother, she has gone as well.

*

Ben flies over the surface of Jakku for hours before finding the downed AT-AT. He had seen it in Rey’s mind, the first time he had ever touched her: a rusted piece of jewelry, half-buried on a dissipating corpse. He sets down an hour before dusk and trudges through the sand with heavy feet.

By the time he finds her little entry point, the nest she built for herself in the ruins of a war that hadn’t really ended, he’s exhausted down to the bone. He unravels his headscarf, pushes his sweat-thick hair back out of his face. Kicks off his lightweight boots and peels his tunic overhead, crawls into a sparse pile of blankets that, inexplicably, still smell just like her.

The wind whistles through old, creaking metal bones. The sand smells like rotting sunlight. The wind smells like water. Ben presses his face into the thin, worn cloth, impressing his cheek on the sand beneath it, and inhales dust and faint salt and the distant sapor of Rey’s hair.

Small hands sneak around his neck, touch his jaw and shield his eyes. A compact body presses against his back. Her slim leg slips between his knees.

“Be with me,” Rey breathes into his ear.

When he moves to face her, to find her, she pins him in place, and doesn’t remove her hands. “No, Ben. Please.”

“I want to see you,” he begs hoarsely.

“You can,” she says desperately. “You can, you _can,_ but you have to _look._ ”

He places a hand over both of hers, over his face. She presses her fingers into his forehead and the bridge of his nose and the bones of his cheek, and hisses sharply in his ear, “ _No_. I don’t—if you disappear again, I won’t be able to bear it.”

He doesn’t move her hand. The place inside of him, the dead space where the Force used to live, yawns like an empty cave, and finally, finally, he allows his spirit to retreat there.

There’s nothing. Darkness. He feels as though he’s sinking to the bottom of a frozen lake, trapped on the underside of the ice. There is no air here.

“You have everything you need,” she says, her voice much closer now.

“I have nothing,” he gasps, the pain blooming in his chest like a mortal wound.

“You have _me_ ,” she says fiercely, “you have _everything._ ”

He reaches for her, for the golden light of her voice. The connection long severed.

“You have to be with me,” she insists. “I can’t put it back if you aren’t.”

“Rey.” His voice is quiet, even to his own mind.

“I can’t hold it forever,” she chokes out. “You’re not _nothing_.”

The Force is not a power you have, Luke’s voice reminds him then.

“It’s the energy between all things,” Ben says, and still with the sensation of Rey’s hands on his face, here at the bottommost trench of his soul, he meditates on the Force as though he had never known it.

Balance. He is suffocating.

Tension. Rey’s saber matching his, strike for strike.

 _Being with_. Fury and ferocity, until she struck him down, until she _brought him back_.

How it felt to kiss her, after hunting her all across the galaxy, after she refused to take his hand, to be his queen, to let him go.

“Be with me,” she says one last time.

After he had touched her, and she had seen him, and forever scarred his fate.

“Be with me,” he repeats, and something like light devours him.

*

Ben opens his eyes in the AT-AT and Rey is kneeling next to him, frowning severely. Her eyes, which are directed at some distant point away from him, are cut with dark, sleepless crescents. She shifts like her leg has fallen asleep, maybe, and her fists are bunched tightly on her thighs.

“You’re here,” he strains, his voice full of holes.

Her gaze fixes on him, heavy and clear, and she leans in over his torso. “So are you,” she sighs. She sounds exhausted.

He reaches for her without meaning to. Pushes up onto his elbows and slips inside of her, circles together their spirits, and for the first time in ages he feels like he can breath.

“Ah, Ben—,” she hisses softly, slumping against his chest. Her head tucks neatly under his chin as though she were once carved out of him, as though she were a piece which had gone missing, and as though she has finally been found.

Here, in newborn sunlight filtering through the cracks of a broken AT-AT, he feels remade.

“Be gentle. I’m still raw,” she murmurs, and then opens for him.

*

Her memories flutter around him.

Loss, first, like a severed limb. Then heaviness, unimaginable weight—the burden, Ben is startled to realize, of carrying his half of their double-soul like a second star. It had chafed inside her, a slow and inexorable crush. It would have devoured her.

Ben feels her fury, her resolve, as if this small segment of her past was his own. FN-2187 flickers through her mind like candlelight, urging her to give up on Ben Solo, and an echo of their argument unfurls in Rey’s thoughts like smoke: “Do you think this won’t kill me? Finn, I can’t wait any longer.” She’d thrust her hands in his face and shown him her arms and fingers, her knuckles and her wrists.

“I don’t want to lose you!”

“If you don’t let me go, you _will_.”

Finn evaporates, and then Ben is watching himself through Rey’s eyes: a spectre draped in pale cloth, toiling beneath an empty sky. She argued with his ghosts, which she could see and hear, which comforted her, which never gave up on him. His family.

She followed him, slipped into the sunset-place between worlds; twined her body around his, only able to perceive his shape when he slept.

A cool hand touches his cheek, here, on the outside. Ben withdraws as gently as he can, mindful of her discomfort. A breath on his neck; a solid press against his chest as Rey’s body inhales, long and low.

He slides his hand down her arm, resting it right above her wrist. Fingers the thin wraps layered over each other. “Show me,” he says.

She gets an elbow under her torso for leverage and pushes up some, pulls at both sets of bindings so the pale fabric drifts to the floor. “Every time I tried to use the Force, I felt as though I were breaking apart.”

Ben touches the strange, pale scars scattered like lightning across her hands, chasing each other all the way up to her biceps. He cups her shoulders, smoothing his thumbs over the lines of her collar bones. 

“It’s why I couldn’t reach you sooner,” she says, her voice wavering slightly. “I couldn’t make it more than halfway through our—our bond.”

He dips into her again. He really can’t help it. He has to know if it hurt, when the excess energy burst out of her. If it hurts now.

He finds the sensation immediately: rolling heat, the sharp drill of splitting skin, losing consciousness to a wave of white light—

“No,” Rey says softly, locking down her mind, pushing him out. “You don’t need that part of it.”

Ben is certain this would have killed her. He’s not sure why it didn’t.

He catches one of her hands and presses his jaw into her palm, then his mouth. Her breath hitches. 

“I need all of it,” he says simply, holding her startled gaze with hooded eyes.

Her fingers twitch against his cheek. He presses a kiss to the inside of each knuckle.

“It’s hard to believe you’re real,” she whispers, searching his eyes, his face. She stares at his mouth to distraction. “I thought I might die before you came back. Before I could touch you again.”

“Couldn’t you?” Ben asks softly, releasing her hand. “I swear there were times that I could feel you.” He shifts his body around to where she has knelt next to him, tucks her between his thighs. He braces his hands on either side of her hips, pressing close and closer, but not quite caging her in.

Her back arches slightly, following the movement, her head tipping up. Her palm hasn’t left his face.

“Rey.”

She doesn’t respond right away. Then she shifts slightly, clearing her throat as if her mouth has gone dry. “In the. The dreams.”

Ben is dimly aware of how warm her body is between his arms, and with a jolt, he remembers the shape of it pressed face-down in his bed. Her freckles, the long line of her back, the spill of her dark hair.

Dim horror slips like ice down the front of his ribs. “I didn’t—I’m sorry, I—”

“We can,” she interrupts softly. “If you want to you. We can.”

She tips forward, rising slightly on her knees. Curves their bodies together just so.

Ben’s hands clam up, prickly with sweat, as he shifts his weight back. He skims her lean thighs, her sharp hips. Delicately settles his palms against the pinched muscle at her waist.

Of course he wants to. From the moment he found her, held her, carried her to his ship asleep in his arms, he’s wanted to. He’s been blinded to anything else since the moment she bulldozed her way inside of him, made space there for herself to live.

She’s the one to kiss him, inching in just like the first time during his moment of hesitation. Her mouth is soft, hot, hungry. Her fingers trace his eyebrows, smooth under his lower lashes, curl behind his ears.

They break apart and he says, “You’re beautiful. I always thought so. Even when I really thought I was trying to kill you.”

“I could tell,” she pants, a small smirk curling her mouth. He pushes his thumb against it, and she leans her face into his hand, rubs his back in slow circles, draws her nails along his spine, under his shoulder blades.

“What happens now?” He asks.

*

He leads her inside his starcruiser. In such small quarters, he is careful not to touch her, not to crowd her with everything he wants. They take turns in the refresher, and he changes out the sheets and blankets in his bunk for clean ones while she assembles a small dinner for two out of his remaining rations. The mundanity of the task grounds him, new and common all at once.

She fills him in on the fate of the First Order while they eat, side-by-side on the bed with a fold-out desk pulled across their laps. “Poe Dameron took over for your—for Leia. Mostly working to stabilize the power vacuum you and Snoke left behind, though most of the First Order soldiers have disbanded. Fin and Jannah—do you remember Jannah from Kef Bir?”

Ben remembers Kef Bir. “The woman from Endor’s ocean moon.”

“Yes. They’re helping to resettle former Storm Troopers, the ones who were taken too young to remember their home systems. Some of their genetic data was salvaged, so they can get pretty close, if they want to.”

Ben nods minutely, trying not to stare at the way her loose top shifts off her shoulder when she reaches for a second piece of bread. She’s wearing one of his black sleepshirts. It hangs past her knees, the lightweight fabric clinging to her damp body.

He has trouble looking at her face, so he fixes his eyes on his plate.

“Lando is working to restore sovereignty to previously occupied systems,” she goes on, glancing up at him. “He wants to keep trade routes open, but the independent governing bodies will—Ben?”

“Hmm?”

She clears her throat. “Could you—look at me for a second?” 

He does, and accidentally catches her gaze.

“Well?”

“Well what,” Ben asks, distracted and caught. Her cheeks are still pink from the hot water, her damp hair pulled in a loose twist over one shoulder. He swears he can see her bare collar bones twinkle in the low cabin lights.

“What do you think? There’s so much to do,” she gestures to the plates and mugs as though a universe is displayed before them. “I don’t know very much about—galactic politics. But you do. When we get back to Ajan Kloss, you can help us organize—”

“Rey,” he says gently, “I don’t think your people are going to involve me in anything remotely attached to their restoration efforts.” He figures they’ll actually throw him in jail, but he doubts Rey would let them. He doesn’t think anyone could stop her from getting what she wants. Part of his heart still aches at the thought of what they could have been together.

“ _My_ people,” she scoffs, “I hardly know them. They’re yours. They’ve always been yours. You just—”

“You can’t just wish away everything I’ve done,” he says, catching the hand she’s gesturing with. “Do you think they’d even let me set foot planetside?”

“They will, or they’ll answer to me,” Rey says viciously. “You _saved_ me. I couldn’t have defeated Palpatine without you.”

“That changes nothing,” he says, sliding out from under the desk to collect the remains of their dinner. Rey follows him into the small galley as he slots the dishes into a processor. “I have done harm to everyone who loves you. They won’t ever accept me.”

Silence stretches for a few moments, broken only by the soft hum of the processor as it sterilizes and dries the plates and utensils.

“If they don’t, we’ll go somewhere else,” she finally says, helping him return the pieces to their cabinets with a faint rattle of metal on metal.

After he folds the desk back into its cubby, he stiffens at the sight of the bunk. Suddenly naked and open and inviting, it taunts and threatens as though it were a venomous reptile. 

“Ben,” Rey says, just behind him. It’s a question. He doesn’t know the answer.

He folds back the corner of the blanket and asks awkwardly, “Do you want the edge or the wall?”

She studies him briefly, his face, the set of his shoulders. Then she says, “Edge.”

He slides beneath the sheets first, leaving as much room for her as he can. The bed is not large, and he is.

She dims the lights, and he hears the catch of fabric as it slips from her shoulders to the floor. The whisper of her bare skin as the distance closes between them. Her hand slips up over his stomach. “You should remove your tunic,” she says. Her voice is steady, but her body is trembling.

He sits up just enough to do as she says, his heart heavy and hammering under his neck.

“We don’t have to,” he says. I don’t want to hurt you, he thinks.

He hears her swallow, and shift, and then her fingers are inching into his waistband. “I think,” she says rigidly, “I think I really want to.”

He catches her wrists gently in his hands. “It doesn’t have to be here.”

Wherever Rey is taking him—another moon around another gas giant, some wild, wet jungle of a place—she’ll be surrounded by her people, Ben’s mother’s people. His father’s people. He won’t have friends there, not at the start. Perhaps not ever. The road ahead of him is long, and though he’ll work to redeem his impossible sins until the end of his life, he does not expect forgiveness from any quarter.

He might look different to her, out in the light of day. Beholden to the scorn of everyone who loves her.

“No,” she whispers softly. She rubs her palm on the side of his neck, applies the slightest pressure. “Do you want to wait until it’s official?”

“I—what?”

She arches her back, her bare hips rolling smoothly—an accident, surely—against his thigh. “Us. The—ah, getting. Married.”

He goes very, very still. “Are you—did you just propose to me?”

She shoots a glare at him, then indecorously pinches his calf with her toe. “What else would we do?”

He shakes his head, stunned, and bundles her against his chest the moment she starts to pull away. “You know I’m essentially a war criminal.” 

“And I’m a Palpatine,” she snaps. “And you’re a Solo, and a Skywalker, and I’m still _Rey from Nowhere_. What does it matter? That was the past. We’re here now.” We’re _each other_ , he hears. And he knows it.

He kisses her then, her skin cool under his hands, and she stretches out long on her back. Her hair falls over his pillow. This time, when she snatches at his trousers, he lets her.

He covers her completely, hides his face in her neck, breathes her in. Her thighs splay open, a hot silk bracket against his hips, but he still hesitates. Just keeps kissing her, his mouth outlining the angle of her jaw. She’s so much smaller than he is.

Rey’s little heels kick into flanks, and the stiff girth of Ben’s cock slides against her cunt, parting the slick petals. She makes a soft sound, so he keeps pressure against her clit without sinking into her. One of his hands spans the entirety of her waist. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he does hurt her, if—

“I can hear you, shut up,” she murmurs, pressing a kiss against his temple. “You’re making me nervous.”

“We can stop,” he says quickly, starting to pull back, but her fingers dig into his shoulder.

“I don’t _want_ to stop,” she growls. “I want this. I _want_ you.” Then, very clearly as though she’d whispered it directly into his ear, Ben hears, I want the waiting to be over.

“Okay,” he replies hoarsely. “Okay. I won’t make you wait anymore.”

Her cheeks, already pink, flush considerably darker, and he shifts the angle of his hips. He can feel, deep inside their shared bond, the tangled ball of nerves in her belly; the heat aching between her legs.

When he sinks inside of her, everything around them seems to shudder and break apart; as though the universe dissolves, is remade around them. As though reality, fractured always, has finally slotted together and become whole. He’s never felt this, anything like this—the way her heart beats in his chest, the desire rushing through her body like a rising sun.

The pressure, the tight clench of her, is almost unbearable. The quiet gasp she makes each time he slowly bottoms out. The wet slide, the smoothness and the rigidity. The heat.

She smells like the desert, like salt with a floral undertone. She tastes like sweetness and slate when he drags his tongue along her neck, finds the dip of her shoulder and sinks his teeth there. She starts to beg him for something, using his name like she’s always known it, singing a hymn that must have been in her blood from birth.

When she comes around his thick girth, Ben almost faints, but the sensation is simply his own release finding him like a punch to the gut. He sees stars, feels them dance low on his spine; feels pulled apart, as though everything he is has been left inside of Rey.

They don’t move for a long, long time, until Rey finally shifts and says, “Crushing me,” and he shifts his weight a little so she can wriggle up next to him.

“Okay,” she says decisively, the effect somewhat watered-down by the way she’s still catching her breath.

Ben just looks at her, the way her hair sticks to her forehead, the way her bright eyes stare fearlessly into his.

She takes his hand in hers, small and strong. He carefully slips their fingers together. 

“I’ll follow you anywhere,” he tells her, even though she knows. Then, “I’m with you.”

“I’m with you,” she whispers.

*

They get married the next morning at a small family court in Mos Espa. It’s as simple as registering Rey’s ID and filing some paperwork, then bribing the official to turn a blind eye to the array of flags that Ben’s serial pings in the system.

They eat street food in the afternoon, and as the day markets wind down, Rey examines a few practical additions to her limited wardrobe, and Ben buys two simple wedding bands.

It’s dusk when they get back to the ship. Rey pre-routes the coordinates for Ajan Kloss, then pulls him into bed just as the second sun slips below the horizon.


End file.
